July 25, 2010 | 12:03 pm

Who’s behind the Bank of Evil?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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I haven’t seen “Despicable Me,” though a surprising number of my adult friends have shown an interest. But I hear that the defunct Lehman Brothers makes an appearance. Sort of:

“The Bank of Evil” has a sign that reads “formerly Lehman Brothers”

Bear Stearns really dodged a bullet there.

July 23, 2010 | 12:01 pm

The Mel Gibson blood libel?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Hardly. The blood libel, at least as Jews experienced it, was a fabrication meant to create fear and hatred for a persecuted people (the People of the Book). In Mel Gibson’s case, reality seems to be working against him.

We’ve all become painfully familiar with his drunken outburst in which he called a female officer “sugar tits” and blamed Jews for “all the wars in the world.” Recently, he pissed off Latinos and blacks with more racist comments and recorded conversations with his ex-girlfriend showed he’s not such a good guy—alcohol involved or not.

As the Oksana saga rolls on, and as Gibson’s career falls further and further from any chance at resurrection, RadarOnline is reporting that Gibson was mad enough at an unidentified Hollywood Jewish macher who he thought had publicly humiliated him that Gibson felt the need for vendetta:

“Oksana says Mel told her, ‘I want Jew blood on my hands,’ and said he wanted the person taken to the desert, stripped naked, knee capped and left in the heat,” a source close to one of the investigations involving Mel told RadarOnline.com exclusively.

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July 23, 2010 | 11:20 am

The Jewish doctors and the angry Hamas father

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Crazy story from YNet about a Palestinian who murdered an Israeli police officer about two weeks after he was permitted into Jerusalem so his 6-year-old daughter could have a tumor removed from her eye, an operation funded by an Israeli non-profit:

Now, imagine that the security establishment would have refused to allow the girl an entry permit to Jerusalem. Merciful human rights organizations and physicians without borders would immediately feed the media with yet another story of the indifference shown by the occupier’s government: A story about a sick Palestinian girl, concerned parents, and a military roadblock.

According to the rhetoric common around here in such cases, someone would have remarked that later we nonetheless wonder why the Palestinians hate us.

Well, the occupation authorities showed mercy to the family in question, without the intervention of the High Court of Justice or human rights group B’Tselem, and the girl was treated at the Jerusalem hospital.

Yet despite this, her father the terrorist did not manage to get rid of his hatred.

A lot of interesting talking points here. Should Israel have allowed the man in? Should anyone expect that an act of kindness is going to turn a Hamas member into Masab Yousef? And what does it take to qualify for aid from this unidentified non-profit?

Read the news story that his op-ed was based on here.

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July 23, 2010 | 12:02 am

If God hates nerds ...

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Pray for my wife. She’s at Comic Con promoting toys and goods related to “Tron: Legacy,” and I just learned that God hates nerds.

Fortunately, my wife isn’t a nerd. (She called earlier to see if I wanted a stuffed Yoda classic or dressed as Santa, and then confirmed, “Yoda is the green one with pointy ears, right?”) In fact, I think she’d rather be at Coonicon—but, then again, who wouldn’t.

Even more fortunately for nerds like myself, the hate is only flowing from Fred Phelps’ followers at Westboro Baptist Church. Speaking of which, I dig that guy’s bomber jacket. (Gulp.) Here is Phelps’ reasoning for why God feels the same way about nerds as he does gays and soldiers and Jews. From Westboro’s picket schedule:

“Are you kidding?! If these people would spend even some of the energy that they spend on these comic books, reading the Bible, well no high hopes here. They have turned comic book characters into idols, and worship them they do! Isaiah 2:8 Their land also is full of idols; they worship the work of their own hands, that which their own fingers have made: 9 And the mean man boweth down, and the great man humbleth himself: therefore forgive them not. It is time to put away the silly vanities and turn to God like you mean it. The destruction of this nation is imminent - so start calling on Batman and Superman now, see if they can pull you from the mess that you have created with all your silly idolatry.”

I’m not really following Phelps’ logic, but I am reminded of just how out of touch Phelps is with reality.

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July 22, 2010 | 4:03 pm

JTA publisher steps down; editor to move up

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Surprising news from the AP of Jewish journalism:

Mark J. Joffe, JTA’s longtime executive editor and publisher, has announced that he has stepped down as head of the global Jewish news service, effective July 21, 2010. Following Joffe’s announcement, the JTA board of directors has tapped Editor in Chief Ami Eden to lead the agency.

“The media industry as a whole is undergoing sweeping changes, and the Jewish media vertical is no different,” Joffe said.  “I am very proud of where I’ve taken JTA, and I believe the organization is well-positioned for the digital age. But after 22 years, I will be turning my energies to other areas where I can make an impact.”

I can imagine. Journalism is unlike many professions, and it’s characterized by a bit of wanderlust. Restlessness is an important ingredient of good reporting, though that should be understood as different than an impulsive need to constantly be changing jobs.

Mazel tov, Mark. And good luck to Eden and the crew at JTA.

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July 22, 2010 | 9:41 am

Lying to get laid will land you in Israeli prison

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Zazzle

There was a wacky legal story out of Israel yesterday that reminded me of a discussion from my first semester torts class. We had been talking about Barbara A. v. John G., a 1983 California case in which an attorney was held liable for having sex with one of his client.

The problem wasn’t what you might expect. Nope. Ms. A was mad—and sued and won a judgment—because she had wanted to use a contraceptive, but Mr. G. didn’t want to and claimed to be sterile. He wasn’t. She became pregnant and sued for battery.

The court held that though Ms. A. had consented to sex, she had not consented to getting pregnant. Based on Mr. G.‘s misrepresentation, consent was invalid.

At least half the students in the class considered this a ridiculous decision. (I’m still not sure how I feel.) But most of the class agreed on two things: it would have been a tort if Mr. G. had claimed to not have AIDS but actually did; and everyone lies when sex is involved. (Above The Law agreed yesterday.)

Which takes us from California to Israel, via Haaretz, where it appears that it’s not just a sin—it’s a crime—to tell lies for the sake of seduction:

Sabbar Kashur, 30, had consensual sex with a woman after he posed as a Jewish bachelor interested in a long-term relationship.

When the woman found Kashur was not a Jew but an Arab, she filed a police complaint that led to charges of rape and indecent assault.

“If she hadn’t thought the accused was a Jewish bachelor interested in a serious romantic relationship, she would not have cooperated,” Judge Zvi Segal wrote in his verdict. Segal said the court had to protect the public from sophisticated criminals who could mislead innocent victims.

Truth be told, Kashur’s exploit is not uncommon. It was in Jeffrey Goldberg’s excellent memoir about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that I read about Jawdat, a Palestinian from Bethlehem who spoke fluent Hebrew:

Before the Intifada, he worked at a Sheraton in Tel Aviv, and he would tell American Jewish girls on two-week holidays he was Israeli, and they would believe him. “I’ve f—-ed more Jewish girls than you have,” he told me once, trying to stir my blood. “We’re circumcised, too. They can’t tell the difference.”

Maybe not, but they’re still the ones deciding to go to bed with a stranger. Call me old fashioned but ... Actually, don’t call me anything. Read what Dan Savage at The Stranger had to say:

When we have consensual sex with strangers—when we go home (or to “a nearby building”) with someone we’ve only just met—we’re not just taking a chance on a person we know very little about. We’re taking a chance on our own judgment. With no way to verify the story of the hot stranger—he could be lying about anything—we’re taking a chance on our own bulls**t detectors. And no one’s bulls**t detectors are 100% accurate. So someone who can’t bear the thought of accidentally f*****g the s**t out of an Arab or a Republican or a married man or a guy who makes less than $250,000 a year has no business f*****g complete strangers. That person owes it to himself/herself to get to know the people he/she wants to f**k a bit better before visiting any nearby buildings with them.

Biblical notions of biblical relations aside—not to mention the racism that this court decision stings of—Haaretz reports sentiments that this establishes a dangerous precedent:

in the past, men who misrepresented themselves in this way were convicted of fraud.

One such case was that of Eran Ben-Avraham, who told a woman he was a neurosurgeon after which she had sex with him, and was convicted of three counts of fraud.

Elkana Laist of the Public Defender’s Office yesterday said the Jerusalem District Court had gone too far in its application of the approach of the High Court, “opening the door to a rape conviction every time a person lies regarding details of his identity. Every time the court thinks a reasonable woman would not have had sex with a man based on that representation, the man will be charged with rape. That approach is not accepted around the world either.”

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July 21, 2010 | 12:46 pm

Evidence of the monkey jihadists

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I almost forgot to mentioned that story about the Taliban training little monkey jihadists. This reminded with the the super rats that Israel used to terrorize Palestinians. There was skepticism. But this video report from Taiwanese news service NMA News shows the proof is in the digital-imaging pudding.

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July 20, 2010 | 5:13 pm

Did liberal journalists conspire to bury Jeremiah Wright coverage?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

The Wrong Rev. Jeremiah Wright received no preferential treatment here, but records obtained by the Daily Caller show that members of JournoList, a listserv comprised of largely liberal media members, may have felt differently:

According to records obtained by The Daily Caller, at several points during the 2008 presidential campaign a group of liberal journalists took radical steps to protect their favored candidate. Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage.

In one instance, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.”

Michael Tomasky, a writer for the Guardian, also tried to rally his fellow members of Journolist: “Listen folks–in my opinion, we all have to do what we can to kill ABC and this idiocy in whatever venues we have. This isn’t about defending Obama. This is about how the [mainstream media] kills any chance of discourse that actually serves the people.”

There are many more unflattering details here. And for a deeper look into JournoList—“Inside the echo chamber”—check out Michael Calderone’s story for Politico last year.

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July 20, 2010 | 10:20 am

NYT Magazine on ‘the new abortion providers’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

The New York Times Magazine had a massive feature on “The New Abortion Providers” last week. The premise is that doctors who provide abortions have been marginalized within the medical profession and have been assaulted, even murdered, by anti-abortion activists. Writer Emily Bazelon opens with a proclamation from Randall Terry, the head of Operation Rescue, which she associates with the first murder of an abortion provider.

Now, Bazelon writes, things have changed:

Over the last decade, abortion-rights advocates have quietly worked to reverse the marginalization encouraged by activists like Randall Terry. Abortion-rights proponents are fighting back on precisely the same turf that Terry demarcated: the place of abortion within mainstream medicine. This abortion-rights campaign, led by physicians themselves, is trying to recast doctors, changing them from a weak link of abortion to a strong one. Its leaders have built residency programs and fellowships at university hospitals, with the hope that, eventually, more and more doctors will use their training to bring abortion into their practices. The bold idea at the heart of this effort is to integrate abortion so that it’s a seamless part of health care for women — embraced rather than shunned.

This is the future. Or rather, one possible future. There’s a long way to go from here to there. Between 2000 and 2005, the last year that statistics are available, the number of abortion facilities in the U.S. dropped 2 percent — a smaller dip than those in the preceding five-year periods, but a decline nonetheless. “The ’90s were about getting abortion back into residency training and medical schools,” says Jody Steinauer, an OB-GYN professor at the University of California at San Francisco, the hub of the abortion-rights countermovement in medicine. “Now it’s about getting abortion into our practices.”

I’m not sure what to make of this story. But Mark Hemingway, a colleague at GetReligion, was. He wasn’t buying any of it, and he critiqued the article under one of my favorite headlines: “There’s a pony in here somewhere.”

Anyway, if you can stomach diving through the pile of bias in Bazelon’s work, she knows the abortion topic well enough and does enough reportage you can usually find a pony of interesting info in there somewhere.

Dig in.

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July 19, 2010 | 7:26 pm

Prop 19 opponent: ‘drugs have no religious preference’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Image: TaxCannabis.org

I occasionally play basketball down in Orange County with a judge who signed the ballot argument in favor of Proposition 19, the California measure that would legalize, tax and regulate the use of marijuana.

I’m a supporter of Prop 19. Believe it or not, I’ve never smoked pot, but I’ve written too many stories about all the loopholes out there for people who want to legally smoke marijuana to think there is much wisdom in maintaining a underground market by treating cannabis different than alcohol.

But California’s black community doesn’t necessarily agree. According to today’s New York Times, they, like Californians in general, are split on the measure. The NYT’s story opens with Ron Allen:

“I was a pastor on crack cocaine, sir,” said Mr. Allen, who says he has been sober for 11 years and now identifies himself as the bishop of the International Faith Based Coalition here. “Drugs have no religious preference.”

And while crack cocaine laid him low, Mr. Allen says his first drug of choice was marijuana. So it is that Mr. Allen and a cadre of other black pastors, priests and other religious leaders have bonded together in recent weeks to fight what they see as a potentially devastating blow to their communities: Proposition 19, the California ballot measure that would tax and regulate marijuana.

In doing so, Mr. Allen and his followers have opened a new, potentially crucial front in the battle over Proposition 19, pitting those afraid of more widespread use of the drug versus those who see legalization as “an exit strategy in the war on marijuana.”

(skip)

How black voters in California decide on Proposition 19, which would allow anyone 21 and over to possess up to an ounce of marijuana, could be critical to its success or failure. (At the moment, possession of more than 28.5 grams of marijuana, about an ounce, is punishable in most cases by up to six months in prison and a $500 fine.)

Blacks make up less than 10 percent of the population in California, but unlike two larger minority groups in the state where opinions on the measure are also split—Asians and Latinos—their “participation in elections is on par with their populations,” according to the California Voter Foundation, a nonprofit group here.

You can read the rest here.

I don’t buy Allen’s argument. But the story does well to show just how divided African American leaders are over this measure. Most notably, San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris, who is black, opposes Prop 19.

Of course, the criminalization of marijuana created a criminal underclass overnight. And the story notes that black men have bore the brunt of arrests for marijuana possession.

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July 19, 2010 | 10:26 am

The burqa ban: a legal perspective

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Last week, I discussed France’s burqa ban. Today, law professors discuss it:

John Yoo: My bet if that the law were written in the way that the French have done it, it might have a chance. As I understand it, the French law does not mention or ban burqas specifically. It prohibits people from wearing masks in public, with certain exceptions for costumes (this being France, where people wander the streets of Paris eating eclairs and dressed up as characters in Dangerous Liasions, I suppose). If a law like that were passed in the US, it would be neutral toward religion on its face, as opposed to a law—like one that banned animal sacrifices, but with an exception for killing animals to eat them—that obviously targeted religion (that too, was another Supreme Court case).

Richard Epstein: Ban the Burqa? Should that be a cause or a concern? The issue is indeed, tough, as Peter Robinson says. And Reynolds v. United States is the worst place to start in thinking about it. Reynolds had to address the extent to which a government ban on polygamy could be imposed consistent with the view that Congress could make no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion. The presumption is thereby set in favor of religious liberty. The question is what can overcome it. Killing third persons is easy, because that prohibition is part of the standard definitions of freedom, which cover only those actions that do not threatened the lives and property of others. Change that rule and the religious autocrat puts us all in the position of kill or be killed. But polygamy threatens no such risk. Within the libertarian calculus the most obvious source of harm is the offense that others take of the practice, and that type of harm rates very low on the scale of public justifications to intervene because it allows worked-up majorities to gain their way by their common sense of indignation. So we want something more…

To see the rest of Epstein and Yoo’s comments at Ricochet, hide the member comments so only the contributors’ show up. More from Martha Nussbaum at the Opinionator blog.

(Hat tip: Above the Law)

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July 19, 2010 | 9:22 am

Exploring Al Qaeda’s online magazine

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

During my morning commute, I heard a fascinating report on NPR about Al Qaeda’s western-style online magazine. Questions remain about who is running the magazine; it appears to be the work of an American who recently surfaced in Yemen and of the Yemeni arm of Al Qaeda (AQAP). But it turns out that Inspire isn’t doing a lot of inspiring Muslims to wage jihad.

NPR’s Dina Temple-Raston reports:

Akil Awan, an associate professor in international terrorism at the University of London. trolls jihadi websites as part of his research. He says for all the attention and concern over the AQAP magazine, it isn’t resonating with young, would-be jihadists.

“It hasn’t made that much of impact online for example within mainstream jihadist sites,” Awan says.

When asked how he can determine that, his answer is simple: “People in the chatrooms just aren’t discussing it.”

It is rather ironic that a publication that was deemed so important by the U.S. intelligence community that it was shown to President Obama as part of a national security briefing has fallen so flat with the people it sought as an audience.

Hegghammer says Inspire magazine’s lackluster debut isn’t necessarily all AQAP’s fault.

After all, most new magazines don’t survive.

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